Our Love Likes the Lies
by Allerdale
Summary: Stranded in Muspelheim after Hela scattered the Asgardian fighting force, Odin and Loki have no choice but to reopen ugly old wounds.
1. Chapter 1

Thrashing, kicking, clawing in vain. Yggdrasil flashing beside them in soaring colors, time and space whipping their hair into a billion directions. They plunge into an amber world of snoozing flames, and fall onto hills made of cooled lava.

It is not good for their knees. Odin stands up with a groan before Loki does. They lost Hela, and Odin knows they should be looking for a way back, but he cannot help but watch as his son's knees shake as he stands.

Once Loki is up, the Allfather catches himself wondering when he added a couple more inches to his height for the dozenth time that day. He thinks it must have something to do with the weight he's lost. Loki's cheeks are as sharp as ever, along with everything else. He could slip into the wind like a ghost if he willed it.

Loki meets his eye for the second time since the fragmented royal family reunited. Just for a second, but it is enough to make Odin shudder at the fury brimming behind them. It's a special fury reserved for him. He knows that because Thor certainly didn't get that look, and even Hela, the Goddess of Death who crushed his beloved home [and playground] into ashes, didn't.

Just as Odin braces himself and hopes his shards of conversation can sustain a conversation, Loki wonders off. Allfather follows but keeps his distance. His youngest always needed to be eased into a conversation. He was beyond intelligent as a boy, hating small talk and rumors, but if you lit him up with the right starting point...

Loki's thin fingers brush against the molten ground. The rough soot and extra powdery ashes cling to the pale tips. Odin can see his son's curiously cautious eyes take in the compounds that make up the sample and then drink up the surroundings without having to watch him do it.

He brushes his wild white hair down, nervous. Fixes his awkward Midgardian clothes, tightens his robe's strings, clears his throat without making a sound.

"I thank you, Loki."

"We need not talk," comes Loki's static voice inside the particles of air that get more condensed by the second. His fingers have curled together. The deceptive muscles in his arms tense.

Odin shuts his open mouth. He can hear Frigga beyond the grave: "So your recompense has come due at last." He thinks it is not fair, that the king side of him got too strong for his father side to keep in check with. His mind had planned to bring their found son into their chamber for a swift yet personal condemnation after giving the boy a few weeks to reflect on what he had done, but once his feet stepped out of the locked room they had kept him in, Odin heard himself barking for him to be chained. Brought before his throne as a captured criminal. He thought his anger and offense would soften at the sight of his youngest son who was no longer dead, but that expression he had carried, the look of pleasure at chains and no remorse for his wicked actions, had brought the monster out of Odin.

The All Powerful Allfather can do nothing but watch as his son stands again and walks ahead without so much as a suggestion of wanting to glance back.

#

Allfather rubs his eye. He's so tired. More than anything he wants to lay his head on his and Frigga's bed, retreat into the Odinsleep and never waken again. But there is no more Asgard. Hela and her never ending army of spawns kept getting stronger with each hit. She would have separated their whole team for the fun of killing each one off on their lonesome if Odin had not run for the nearest boots that a rip in Yggdrasil was already sucking in.

He wants to thank Loki for not kicking him off, he supposes. And he wants to embrace him because Frigga's gone and his youngest bends to the ground like her and his eyes slant like hers when he's angry and he thrashes his daggers with her angles and tricks and...and...Odin feels his eye stinging again. He for all his compromised strength and power wants to hold on to his son before Hela breaks the entire World Tree into splinters. Is that too much to ask?

At the edge of a plateau made of crumbling rock, Odin watches his son look into the horizon. His jaws are working. His hands twisting. He seems to think something through before he jumps.

Allfather bolts to the edge, heart pounding, where he sees Loki standing a few feet below. Streams of burning lava twist around him, which he isn't paying any attention to. The thing that Odin forgets so often comes back to him. Loki's a Frost Giant whether he likes to admit his anatomy or not, and he believes Loki's got enough common sense to put together that they're in Muspelheim, but... His heart rams up to his throat. Frost Giants die in Muspelheim. As if to confirm, Loki's breathing deepens and quickens at such close proximity to the lava. He swats thick sweat off his brow.

Perhaps that was the death Hela intended for him. Crabs dropped into a slowly heating pot; that's the idea she got to rid herself of Loki. She got it wrong if she expected his son to just curl up and accept his trap.

Allfather climbs down to where Loki stands. He collects the residue of his Odinforce to create a comfortable temperature around the boy, but it's barely forming when Loki's gaze soars to him.

"What? You think I'm going to melt?" he spits. Odin opens his mouth, but Loki cuts him off with a violent wave. "I have no need for your protection, _Allfather dearest_."

Odin's exasperated. "I am trying to help my son."

Loki's nostrils twitch while a slight wheeze takes over his strong voice. "What son? You grabbed the wrong boots."

Allfather can't help it. He's too old to pretend he can handle the animosity between them. His eye waters until it spills over this time. "I know I—"

Odin startles at the speed in which Loki storms over to him. He's right in front of him, the closest he has been for four years, drops of sweat dripping on his robe. His eyes blaze like a dying supernova with an agenda. He has a gut feeling that his tears have triggered him, not his trying to mend their shattered relationship.

"No speaking, no aiding, no putting so much as a flake of your skin on me. Does your festering brain comprehend my words, old man?" He crushes one of Odin's sandled feet. He's so close their chests touch; that Allfather can see the absence of Frigga's tender embraces written across his skin. "Leave me be for the rest of my pathetic life or so help me Norns I _will_ ring the blood out of you after freeze-burning your fleshly coil."


	2. Chapter 2

Loki has gone ahead. They have been climbing across valleys and hills encircled by crawling lava for what feels like hours. By now, Odin is certain his son's searching for the wormhole to take him (not them) to the realm above Muspelheim.

A thought has been gnawing the Allfather. Yes, Loki is not looking any better, but the recognition that they had not seen one Fire Giant even from a distance sparked in Odin's thrumming head. He's worried that they have gone to another realm to conquer what Hela left vulnerable, or that they are observing the trespassing Asgardians from afar, which could be worse. Can they see his frazzled state of mind? Did they hear of the breakdown that caused Odin to march around Midgard screaming of Ragnarok in the rags of homeless folk? Or can they see that Loki's slowing down? His bones softening so that he's getting shorter?

Odin casts a glance behind his shoulder to the valley they had just climbed out of where Loki threw up two inches of his height. Literally. The Allfather wonders if the heat hurts. If it does, Loki's not showing it.

Back in his boyhood Odin would follow his father into wars with the Frost Giants, and the beasts would scream in earnest when fire entered the game. Magicians who could harness the power of fire were heroes on those fields. And when he got older and colder, some demonic notion that he should brand the Giants he captured with the crest of the House of Odin infected his mind. It was even better than fire because the iron burned through their bones, and never ceasing fiery pain tortured them until they died.

Allfather watches his son's thin tendrils brush against his clammy neck as the memories flutter away along the breeze that's picking up. He wonders what family crest Laufey engraved in his skin, if his boy would recognize it as a part of the language he never learned.

They wonder a while more. Loki walks into rabbit holes, at one looking back and forth between the walls of the collapsed cave as if to ask where they had sprung up again. Odin does not say a thing. His youngest has not been reacting to him decreasing the feet between them every mile or so, and he dares not ruin this little intimacy.

While they're climbing yet another peak, heading in the direction of the sleeping volcano countered by the eerie wind that's only getting stronger and hotter, Loki trips over loose rocks. Odin stands back frozen while his son fights to get back up on his feet. He had noticed his dizzying steps, noticed the moment he'd nearly gotten to his knees to throw up again about fifty paces ago, but he also remembered Loki screaming in his face. So, the Allfather waits in patience for the right moment to step in. It comes moments later when Loki sits back down on the cracking dried lava and twists himself around like he has no choice but to throw up this time. Odin kneels at his side, combs back his frizzing hair, sets a hand against his slippery forehead, and holds him up.

"Be still my boy. I am here." But Loki does not so much as make a sound. He is not throwing up. His eyes roll back, his lungs sound like they're filling with water, and Odin holds him so close. A quarter of Loki's weight now is his soaked leather and clad. He expects a seizure.

Odin pushes the power of the Odinforce into him to calm his panicked body first. He will not watch his youngest die again. He will not take the boy's strength for granted again. And so he pushes more in to reverse the destruction of the blistering heat inside his every atom.

#

Odin gasps as the searing volts rip through him. For a moment all he can do is wait for the agony to pass, but that moment stretches into minutes. Once it subsides, he stares down at Loki in his arms. His eyes have closed. Pools of sweat have gathered between the dips of his collarbone. His lips hang open from exhaustion.

A roaring wave of hot anger boils through Allfather's skin. He shakes him until he can hear the water rattling in his lungs.

"Loki!" He shakes him with ever growing intensity and yells his name louder until his son's shell of a body animates again. He grumbles in a wheezy high pitch after so much shaking. He's disoriented, feverish, agitated, and his head is splitting. His glassy eyes lock onto Odin, and Odin can't hold it back.

"Who in all the Nine Realms dares wrap your mind around their demented fingers? Speak their name at once."

Loki struggles to push him away, redness blooming on his cheeks, but the heat and his soul being pulled like a puppet being flailed this way and that have made him as weak as a mortal child. "Get away from me," he screams.

Odin ties his arms into a bunch. Pulls his face up to his by clawing through his collar. "You shall tell me or—"

"Or you will ravage and plow through my soul to find them? Oh how *kind* you are, Allfather." His cracked lips thin. "I would rather be raped by a horde of Niflheim's most lustful dead."

A chuckle rips across Odin's throat. "Oh, you would enjoy that."

Loki looks at him with a glimmer of a comeback in his eyes, but he does not say it. Instead he spits a thick wad of watery phlegm right into his eye and brings a knee up and slams the air out of Odin, and while he gasps from the sudden turnaround, Loki crawls until he frees himself.

"No," Odin whispers as the shocks of pain in his ribs dull. He harvests his fury; scrambles up to his knees just in time to catch Loki's ankle before he could walk into the distance again. He pulls with all his might.

Loki topples. For a moment the boy's stillness makes Odin panic. Did he hurt him? He's got to remember his boy's sensitive in this climate even if he does have bursts of strength. Allfather takes a deep breath, tosses the spit off his face completely, and crawls towards him.

"Son, you must listen to what I have to say." He reaches his ankles. "In the Vault, I admitted I stole you," he pauses next to his knees, "but you did not hear me when I was trying to tell you—"

"I did not," Loki says as he sits up, "because your lies disqualified you from ever trying to fix them." Suddenly, his melting boot meets Odin's face.

The Allfather bites the hot dust while stars fly, but his son gives him another furious kick that rolls him face up again.

"Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I killed you _and_ Laufey."

Odin spits the blood and dust strings out of his mouth. "Your mother would not have been very happy."

"As far as I am concerned," Loki says as he kneels next to his father, "she would have been next."

"Oh how you worship your lies, Loki. How you hide yourself in them. I wonder who taught you so well." It is a calculated response that gets Odin just what he wanted.

Loki's hard eyes stare down at him as his fingers wrap around his face. "You wish to play this game, Allfather? You wish to _talk_?" And the simmering anger under shimmering pale skin boils up into a focused, hideous, ageless, twisted grin. "You taught me, you fucking bastard. Let us start and end with that."

Odin feels the frostbite travel though his face before he realizes Loki's skin is turning blue.


	3. Chapter 3

The Allfather screams as festering cold boils claw up through his skin. Agony ripples across his entire body as they tear through pores and sink their freezing tendrils of pain deep into bone. He screams louder as they catch his eye sockets, where a persistent dry coldness pounds until he swears they are bleeding. He grabs Loki's wrists only for his finger's skin to crack at the furious cold. He stumbles and fights his way free from Loki's iron grip pressing against his scalp, but he knows the reason he escapes is because his son let him go. He runs and kneels next to one of Muspelheim's geysers. It will buy him time as he gathers shards of the Odinforce to heal the parts of him that pierce with the burn of frostbite.

He will _not_ fight his boy. He will _not_.

"What's the matter, Allfather?" ricochets Loki's deepened voice between the steam thickening the world of fire. Rocks crush into smithereens under his nearing boots. "From whence does this sudden fear of a petulant Frost Runt come from? It shan't take long for It to die in this weather."

"You are not an _it_ ," Odin growls.

The sweat streaming down Loki's skin and the red eyes blinking and the chapped frowning blue lips make him look more unhinged than ever. "How convenient. Never mind the centuries gone by in which I felt like nothing more but a specter dwarfed by the spectacles of a palace that did never accept my presence. Now, as your true enemy, at last you choose to honor me."

Allfather forces himself to his feet. The Odinforce is unsynchronized, jumpy, broken. It is healing him ever so slowly, but he will be goaded into this argument.

"Is that what you felt?" He stares right into the glowing ruby eyes of madness as he nears. "Never mind the nights I wakened and took you, a frantic babe spent from fever, out to breathe the stars as I told you stories. Never mind the waking moments of numbing fear I suffered when your mother sent you to study under that maniac sorceress in Nornheim. Never mind when I abandoned my throne and did not allow my eye to shut until I found you, chained among soul eaters with your naked body covered in her blood and entranced like the tool she always wanted you to be. I have honored you without fail from the moment my eye found you in so many ways no amount of time would be enough to convey."

A flash catapults through Loki's eyes. "You Norns damned _liar_."

"Where is the lie?" Odin roars back.

The glower Loki gives him would have been enough to make a celestial hide under the curtains of the skies. "Where do I begin?" he whispers, but the stirring sand and dust gathering in the wind carries his voice from the east to the west. "Where was _my_ ordination to a weapon when I graduated into the active warrior rank? Where was _my_ Pledge of a Prince ceremony when I came of age? How many times were you a silent witness to the mocking and dishonor given to me from your court?" He kicks up a cloud towards him: "Better yet the question that leads to them all: why does my skin bear the crest of rotten trolls instead of Odinson if I be so beloved by you?"

The last is the question that strikes Odin into silence. What to say? I wanted to save you from the pain of fire in your bones for the rest of your life? I thought the natural runes of your birthright were too beautiful even in their perversion to mar? There is but one truth, and the fury in Loki's eyes tells him he knows.

"Why devalue the relic you plundered, right?"

"Absolutely," Odin mutters. "Next you will tell me to skin you and wear your hide while I prance around your corpse with petals in my hair. Do you hear what foolishness you speak?"

Loki shakes his head slowly. He launches at full speed with fingers poised as claws.

The two soar over the simmering geyser with Loki's tattered green cape binding them together and land with a thud at the foot of a waking volcano. All Odin is aware of while they pull each other's hairs and Loki sinks his teeth into cotton pants and salty skin and Odin shoves him away as much as he can from the rumbling shoulders of the volcano...the blue of Loki's skin is draining away.

Drawn out of his berserk fury by slamming his knuckles against the hard, hot sediment from decades of eruptions instead of Odin's face, Loki falls back and bites down on his lip while his face turns bright red from the scream he's burying. Allfather takes advantage of the moment by grabbing long locks of his hair and twisting them together up to the root. He cranes his head backwards and takes the injured hand in his once he is certain the boy's too preoccupied with the pain to fight back. The wrist is twisted awkwardly, knuckles blown, and bones poking out of where they shouldn't be.

"No more. You will hurt yourself more than you have. Let me say what I have been trying to."

"Norns, strike me now," Loki says with a sharp edge.

"I did not say I would force you to listen. I just want you to stay put before you in your blind fury march right into a basin of lava." He takes in a deep breath. "I regret many things, Loki, yet my deepest regret is that I did not answer the question that will forever stand as a wall between us as I should have.

"When you asked me what more you were than my son, I should have told you the truth: that you are my world. I should have said you were the son who turned my life upside down, made me question all the choices I did or did not make. You are my walking judge, the breathing reminder that my carelessness has cost Yggdrasil her life, and you were why I never once dreamed of abdicating the throne for fear of losing all the peace I had forged for you and Thor to reign together in."

Odin withstands the dull frostbite still clinging to patches of his skin. He reroutes the power of the recovering Odinforce to the quaking, pulsing hand in his. Loki melts into his hand as the warm rush of it carries from the top of his head to the tips of his crinkling toes.

Unbidden, the memory of the countless times he met young Loki's side at the infirmary flash before his eyes. All the broken arms, sprained ankles, deep cuts, and [Frost Giant] pneumonias. All the agitating hours of meetings before he could run to their chambers, snatch King's Strategy and a book, and mount Sleipnir to carry him there. All the times Frigga chided him for being late and Thor whining about how hungry he was while Loki couldn't make it through a chapter of the new book before he fell asleep in Odin's arms.

And then there was all the screaming and shouting and slamming of doors once Loki grew overnight, or so it seemed. No page the two could meet at. No breakfast that passed without one of them provoking the other even in silence. When they weren't together, there was just a boiling temporary truce.

Yet still, the Allfather thinks to himself, I would not once wish to have never found him in the snow. He remembers a star shooting across the sky right above them as if the Fates themselves were blessing their meeting. Which reminds him...

"Once upon a time, long before I knew your names and before your Mother was grown enough to dance at the Feast of the Valkyries, I travelled the eons with my father when we stumbled upon an unending scar of fire in the galaxy. The Phoenix, stirring in her nest of cradle stars, took me up into her presence.

"'Borson,' she said to me, 'The father of one who will be great among the ages. The God of Thunder, destroyer of Celestials, Great King of the realms, the unstoppable beast of war; tell me, would you make a bargain with me?'

"I asked her what she, a being of legends, could possibly want from me. 'The God of Choas, the murderer of the gods, the Great Serpent of old, the intelligent devil that never knows when to quit. I ask you to give me his heart. But I want you to cut it out while he breathes still."

He glances away from the bronze sky and looks down to see Loki fighting back a scowl. He decides to release his hair in favor of tracing the lines on his hand as if he were retracing the stars in the galaxy that day.

"I asked her what she wanted his heart for. 'The Phoenix is not to be questioned, you imp. But I will say Thunder and Lightning shall never pass away. The legend borne from you will forever be protected from the powers of Death on the life of The Phoenix.'"

While the last of the broken bones snap into place, Odin takes Loki's chin, pulls it away from the distance over his shoulders to meet his face. He does not react to the obvious effort the boy's putting into not meeting his eye. "What say you? What do you believe I said?"

The rolling storm behind Loki's eyes calm. He blinks once, inhales a sharp breath, and his eyes let go of the distance as they meet Odin. Their brilliance and the shadows stretching under them contrast so well that they conceal but not completely hide the glistening of teardrops welling at their corners.

He's looking at him, honest to the heights of Yggdrasil and the depths of infinity, he heard every single word. The process of his mind churning a response is something the Allfather cannot begin to explain the wonder of because no one can hear you like Loki can if he chooses to. The lightyears between them shrink, and that realization is more than enough to make the Allfather want to smother him and weep happy tears and feast for centuries. How long has it been since he inspired anything besides insults and curse words out of the boy?

He is aware Loki can pick up on his thoughts—they must be plain as day thanks to the pathetically blissful smile Odin cannot reign in—but he does not care.

Loki hangs his head, grabs his healed wrist, and scrapes sharp, new nails across his fine skin. "Brilliant story, Allfather, but I know how to make it better."

Odin's brow twitches. He lets go of his hand. "Now hold on right there—"

Loki meets his gaze again with a look of war. There is not even a sparkle of trapped tears. A trick. "What if I cut your heart out first?"

He feels a sudden tear through his ribs as the duplication before him breaks apart into the wind. Before he can make a move, the real Loki yanks the dagger to the left. Odin feels his left lung tear into two.

His hand. He shouldn't have let go of his hand.


	4. Chapter 4

Odin chokes on blood; vision bathes in red. His fingers tear into the ashen dust as the dagger sinks in again, this time so close to his heart that he feels it touch a ventricle. It is a bizarre detachment he feels as the Odinforce separates from him, like a thin layer of skin peeling away all at once. The power surges stronger than ever as it battles to cling on, but just as a nova burns brightest near death, so does the Odinforce.

Through a veil of agonizing spasms in his chest and spreading pain and stars flashing before him, Odin watches as a volcano slumbering a mile away also sheds, but he realizes with a jolt that he is _not_ hallucinating the layer after layer after layer of hardened sediment falling away. It crumbles like a sandcastle shaken by the residual tension of a high magnitude earthquake. He can't see Loki as he has crouched low enough to hold his hair back and traces the bloodied tip of the dagger against his cheek, but the ruckus from underneath the ground makes him slow his methodical ritual of torture. A minute of silence goes by, the eerie kind yet again which causes the hairs on Odin's neck and arms to stand, but from the charred ruins of what was the interior of the volcano rises a mountain of a beast as it tears its home planet apart.

It is a disoriented, smoldering Fire Giant. A hatchling, so to speak, but even as a hatchling it looms over them five times their size. It has woken just in time for the world to end.

It stumbles and puffs after decades of the dark nutrience of its mother's remains burning and breaking and hardening into a cradle fit for a king, but it does not pause when its settling eyes catch sight of their strange, tiny shadows. It roars, setting the land before it ablaze, and squashes the geysers—the resting places of Giants who never awakened—into flatland as it devours the distance between them.

Odin watches, blinking the stars out of his eye furiously, while Loki scrambles to his feet. The dagger drops with a sharp clink just next to Odin's ear while Loki throws his arms up over his head and the Giant's fist comes flying down way too fast. The force field he conjures blocks them both from harm, but the last minute enchantment and the unhinged force make him drop to his knees right beside Odin.

The first birth creates a chain reaction. A minefield of hatching volcanoes in the distance makes itself known through deep bursts and tearing contractions across all of Muspelheim. It makes the Allfather's bones shake. He braces the shards of the Odinforce that he's still got and reinforces Loki's force field while the Giant smashes again. The blazing fires of the infuriated Giant flare up so much that it glows stronger than the Sun, but it illuminates the hardest, cruelest, most unamused features on Loki's face as it burns.

"If there is one thing that pisses me off more than that old man's face, it is giant oafs smashing their fists into my business," he seethes. That is the moment Odin catches sight of veins of ice stretching beyond their force field. "Did your mother never teach you to ask before your barge in?" The cracking sound of pure ice snuffing flames comes one millisecond before the guttural scream of the Giant.

Odin's eye triple takes between them while everything else washes into a blur of colors. He's trying to think. If Loki can project such pure biological magic from the power written into his DNA, then where does his strength end? Where does it begin? What is for show and what is real?

Ice daggers form in Loki's hands as the Giant topples onto its backside, pushing itself as fast as it can to outrun the veins that stalk it.

"Crawl faster, you brute. This is what you wanted," Loki yells over the loud awakening still coming from miles away. With a shaky throw, one of the daggers tears through the Giant's foot. It melts with a frying hiss but leaves a gaping hole three times bigger than the entry wound.

Odin forces himself onto his feet. He feels dizzy from exhaustion and blood loss, in so much pain he can hardly keep himself from bending into two, but he would rather fight than wait to die. He stretches his arms out and traces runes into the sky. A sliver of the east wind comes to his command from the deep north of the closest celestial galaxy, one that has no sun, and he directs the surreal biting currents to wash over Loki as he charges straight for the Giant's head. It makes the runes all around his body glow, like stardust set on fire.

What the boy had intended to do was blind the Giant with frostbite, but instead it incinerates with a blinding burst of blue at first touch. Loki falls face first into the icy ashes left of it, but picks himself up and dusts it off immediately. The commotion was more than enough to catch other Giants' attention. Three claw and tear through their broken planet in their rage to avenge their deceased cousin.

Odin casts a glance to Loki, but Loki does not so much as seem like he's deliberately ignoring him. The reluctant truce has picked up again, which means Loki will resume his vengeance once the intruders into their personal drama are gone, but Odin is alright with that. He blocks the first incoming fist with his own force field while Loki bleeds a sheet of ice all around them within a ten mile radius.

It is a genius idea only he would think of.

With their own magically foraged weapons in hand—and sometimes two for both when Odin doesn't feel like he needs to keep his organs from spilling out of the gash behind his shoulder—the two slip and slide and skate around the Giants on the ice. They move too fast for them to keep up, and within minutes they too are reduced to icy ashes or their ectoplasmic fire skeletons.

#

Allfather knew it was too easy to be right, he just didn't want to put a damper on their honest success rate. He glances towards Loki ten miles away. He is on his knees sucking in deep breaths as he pushes the cold out of his veins through the palm of his hand and onto a hissing burn on his right arm.

The last Giant was a nasty fight for both. It was smarter, flared its feet up to melt their sheet of ice right in front of them, and it was faster, blocked or dodged both of their weapons or spells two out of three times, but in the end it fell as Loki sunk a strange, different dagger into its spine.

It was the giveaway.

Odin returns his focus into the distance. The burns he too had acquired fester deep, but he does not pay attention to them. He ignores the worsening pain in his chest as well. He is concerned with the fact that they had heard hundreds of Giants break through their nests yet only half a dozen ended up attacking. Where are the rest? Where are their fathers? Where by the names of the Norns is their King? He and Surtur have an abundance of unsettled business.

Loki gets back to his feet. He walks around the edge of the hissing pool of melted ice, across the ashes of two Giants, and straight for the opposite direction Odin is staring at.

The Allfather catches his arm. "How long have you carried the Casket with you?" he asks, and what sounded like a ridiculous question in his head now sounds like the most natural question to ask in the entire galaxy.

Loki tears his arm free. "Pardon?"

"You transformed a generous patch of pure magma rock into pure ice. You created living veins that followed your target too. I know the power of an Infinity Stone when I see it."

Loki's brows furrow. A corner of his lips twitch as he considers saying something, but then he shakes his head with a look of bewildered disappointment. Starts walking away again.

Odin follows even though each step makes the pain deeper. "What? Playing fetch for the one who holds your soul captive?" The accusation only makes Loki walk faster. "Tell me who it is and I shall carve the crest of the house of Odin into their spilled organs."

Not even a pause.

"Loki, speak their name or I _will_ look for it. If I must be cruel to be kind—"

He bumps into Loki's chest. He'd turned all the sudden on his heels. Now, he peers at his father with an expression that cannot be defined.

"You look anything but well, Allfather," he says in a sweet tone, although a spark in his eyes tell Odin his words should be taken as mockery.

"The Odinforce is dying. Of course I am unwell."

"Yet you have not nodded off. It is nice to keep functioning, is it not?"

Odin's cheeks flare. "The Odinforce is not an entity whose actions I can predict. Should I have enough warning that it is failing, which I did, I can separate myself from it although I risk being unable to capture it again."

It suddenly strikes Odin odd that Loki's skin appears as marble as statues, but it also has a transparency to it that lets him see his veins are glittering. He blinks a little to quickly when he looks closer. There is something dark in them. As if Loki wasn't acting peculiar enough already, he draws closer to Odin with his hands reaching for his.

"Do you remember what happened, Allfather?"

Odin feels his blood start boiling as his son's fingers close around his. "I commanded you to tell me who—"

"Extraordinary," Loki says in a gentle tone. "Are you really so thick? What does your mind remember? A fight for the throne with a dagger and Gungnir? A magic trick? Me asking you kindly to leave Asgard?" Odin blinks. "Of course you'd choose to forget," he whispers, but the look on his face isn't anger, it is an apology. "This little runt couldn't possibly be stronger than you, could he?" After a moment of silence for Allfather to stew in confusion, Loki starts on his way again, but he trods with heavier, angrier steps across the rocks.

"Why are you so cross with me, boy?" Odin yells after him. "Tell me what I have forgotten." But Loki keeps on his path.

Odin grumbles and shakes some ashes off his clothes just to keep busy. What would Frigga say to see them like this? The thought makes sorrow well up inside his heart. He knows not what Frigga would say, but he knows she would not let Loki walk alone no matter the size of the mountain between them.

Just as he takes the first step to follow Loki again, a rumble of tectonic plates shifting and whining under their feet fills the silence of Muspelheim. First, Odin sees puffs of smoke rising into the stifled air from opening cracks. Next, he hears an odd sound, like the hiss of a snake stuck in a reverb room. Without another warning, a giant black snake tears through the ground right in front of Loki.

Appendages and guts of Fire Giants break away from its fangs. Loki falls as the ground under his feet peels back. With blood dripping out of his nose and his hair fallen across his face, he clenches his fingers together.

"Hela," Loki screams, and his voice sends a pulse through Muspelheim.

Before Odin can register anything else, Jörmungandr's gaping mouth tears into Muspelheim again with Loki disappearing into his belly.


End file.
